I’d been a foster and adoptive parent for about six and a half years when, in late 2014, I first came across the poem “Limbic System” by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929-2022).
I was learning about brain function in relation to prenatal exposure and developmental trauma. (The latter term refers to injuries to a child’s brain caused by deprivation or neglect or substance abuse or by the experience of domestic violence.) “Limbic system” was a phrase that came up a lot in the literature.
As far as I know, Enzensberger was not thinking about developmental trauma when he wrote the poem sometime in the late 1960s. 1
But developmental trauma was the context that made the poem shimmer for me. It also made me think more seriously about the “triune” model of the brain, which clearly gave Enzensberger his conceit. I’ll discuss the triune brain model below.
But, first, here is the poem in an English version:
LIMBIC SYSTEM
It is ancient, it is spongy,
does not understand itself,
has no idea what limbus means,
what a system is.
Between vault and girder-beam,
a miniature limbo.
River-horse, belt, almond’s-kernel:
a dark memory-place
that can remember
nothing of itself.
Uncontrollable
it controls
fear lust murder hunger
A cable-tree
of loops and fibres
deep in the skull
some staying in, some going out.
Crawling currents, smoldering
fires, short circuits.
Little deficits
that escalate fast.
A tug at the controls;
revenge will be had.
An electrical poke —
we’re running amok.
A few billion cells
in darkness. The human line
a tiny knot
between origin and
amnesia. 1
Uncontrollable
Hans Magnus EnzenSberger
it controls
fear lust murder hunger
As I mention above, Enzensberger’s poem draws upon a model of the architecture of the brain — the “triune brain.” This model supposes that the most evolved part of the human brain, the prefrontal cortex (where advanced reasoning and self-control reside), sits more or less on top of a paleo-mammalian part of the brain, the limbic system (where emotion and social feeling live). And that the paleo-mammalian part — which includes such structures as the amygdala, thalamus, hypothalamus, striatum, and hippocampus — sits in turn on the most evolutionarily ancient part, the brain stem, sometimes (and a bit misleadingly) called the reptile brain, where fight-or-flight responses to dangers in the environment originate.
So the poem above follows out the relation between the limbic system and emotional overwhelm, when the imperatives of self-defense over-ride rational response, when a brain plunges into survival mode.
This triune model, usually credited to the American physician and neuroscientist Paul D. Maclean, continues to be influential in psychology. But it has taken some heavy criticism since the early 1990s for oversimplifying evolutionary history as well as for overstating the functional divisions between regions of the brain. 2
Even so, the “triune brain” model remains instructive for anyone trying to understand the behaviours of children who have been formed by trauma.
As the Canadian psychologist Stuart Shanker explains it in his book Reframed: Self-Reg for a Just Society (2020), the limbic system, the paleo-mammalian brain, which “evolved to meet the … complex social needs of mammals[,] is constantly scanning its environment for friend or foe.” 3 When the limbic system senses threat or danger, it activates an ancient survival response. In such moments, the prefrontal cortex – where rational thought and language reside – gets “consigned to a secondary role” and the body goes into fight or flight (or freeze) mode.
This potential physiological response is built-in to all human beings, whatever our neurotype.
Shanker contends that teachers, medical practitioners, social workers, and foster parents have much to gain by learning to “speak limbic.” That is, by learning how the paleo-mammalian interacts with the other parts of the brain — and learning to notice how human brains and bodies are constantly scanning their environments for perceived threats and dangers but also for safety and affection.
Why does “speaking limbic” matter? Many of the most vulnerable children and adults in our society have developmental trauma (including prenatal exposure to various substances). It doesn’t take much in the way of an overstimulating or even mildly threatening environment for people with neurodiversities of this sort to get dysregulated. The manifestations of this brain state can look sometimes like disproportionate or socially inappropriate emotional response, sometimes like hyperactive or uncontrolled/uncontrollable or even aggressive behaviour.
In Shanker’s title, “reframing” names the single most important insight that anyone supporting a child with developmental trauma or other sorts of neurodevelopmental disability can arrive at: namely, “that what sounds [and looks] “aggressive is in fact self-defensive.” Bearing down hard on someone’s fight-or-flight self-protective response in a law-enforcement style only produces an intensification of that person’s feeling of danger — and so of the same behaviour. When the authorities misunderstand the meaning of these “limbic utterances,” it leads to all sorts of trouble (interpersonal, institutional, legal).
And the limbic system isn’t only in play when the brain is, as it were, going ape-shit. It does far more than function as an alarm system. The limbic system also makes possible our capacity — beginning with the attachment of child to parent in early life — to form emotional associations, and so to be connected with and comforted by other living beings. Shanker calls this “limbic resonance.” He notes that the paleo-mammalian part of the brain in each of us needs limbic resonance with other humans if we are “to manage stress in a manner that promotes growth and recovery.” (This softening and recuperative aspect of the limbic system, please note, does not appear at all in Enzensberger’s poem. 4)
Shanker hopes to disturb our settled ideas about challenging behaviour in children. He argues that many of the 2500-year-old ideas we think with – philosophically authoritative concepts such as will, choice, self-control, and self-discipline – are not much informed by the way the brain actually works.
My only disappointment with Shanker’s otherwise brilliant book is that he has nothing to say at all about children and adults affected by prenatal exposure to alcohol — even though they are the largest population of Canadians who struggle with “self-reg” and for whom the question of justice over their life-spans is a far from abstract consideration. Ira J. Chasnoff, a professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of Illinois College of Medicine, explains a common result of prenatal exposure to alcohol as follows: “Alcohol’s effect on the [hippocampus, corpus callosum, or other areas of the] limbic system interferes with the transmission of information from its entry point in the brain to the prefrontal cortex.” 5 For children prenatally effected by alcohol, the possibility of neurological “short circuits” is a reality every moment of every day.
Enzensberger’s poem, even if it overstates the degree to which the unconscious and the autonomic are housed in a primitive region of the brain, is helpfully ironic about the usual neurological hierarchies. The rational part of the brain is much less in control than it supposes, chooses its behaviours far less than it imagines. His first few stanzas describe a limbic system functioning mostly as it should, in an undamaged, neurotypical human brain. But add enough environmental stress, the poem suggests, and anyone’s paleo-mammalian brain will manifest
Crawling currents, smoldering
fires, short circuits.
Little deficits
that escalate fast.
A break-down of limbic connections will in turn cause difficulties with regulation of the emotions, impulse control, attentional focus, and other brain functions.
“Limbic System” underscores the contingency of the human brain, its imperfections and its “little deficits” [kleine Defekte]. I like this last phrase so much in fact that for a while it was the working title of my memoir (and that’s why it shows up too in the URL of this blog). The phrase is ironic; ironic detachment was something of a vocational requirement for German poets of the late twentieth century. And, yes, absolutely, there are significant problems with a “deficit”-centered, medical approach to disability — see my post of March 24.
Enzensberger’s poem suggests that, neurotypical or otherwise, we all must learn to live with, and learn to live with one another living with, the complex evolutionary imperfection of our animal brains. There are, in other words, plenty of “little deficits” to go around.
Image: Glial Cells of the Cerebral Cortex of a Child, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1904 (Cajal Institute, Madrid). Please note that Cajal’s image does not represent the triune brain model.
1 In fact, Enzensberger probably had in mind the mass violence of the twentieth century and its wars — which, if true, would involve a misapplication of a theory about the brain that is itself (as I will explain) already something of a simplification. The misconception that the limbic system is somehow more ‘primitive’ — more associated with brutishness — than the prefrontal cortex can be seen in a sentence like this recent one from the New York Times: “The upcoming Republican primary race, like the last one, is going to be fought on a limbic level, not an ideological one. It will be about who is weak and who is strong” (Michelle Goldberg, “The Sickening Déjà Vu of Watching Trump Manhandle DeSantis,” April 21, 2023).
2 This English version is part Enzensberger’s own [stanza 1], part mine [the rest of the poem]. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Selected Poems, English and German (Bloodaxe Books, 1994). The German text: “Es is alt, es ist weich, / es versteht sich nicht, / weiß nicht, was limbus bedeutet, / was ein System ist. // Zwischen Gewölbe und Balken / eine Vorholle, winzig. / Ammonshorn, Gurtel, Mandelkorn: / ein dunkles Gedächtnis, / das sich seiner selbst / nicht erinnern Kann. // Unkontrollierbar / Kontrolliert es / Angst Lust Mord Sucht // Seine Schleiten und Tasern / ein Kabel baum / tief im Schädel / intra- und extramural. // Kriechströme, Schwelbrände, / Kurzschlüsse. / Kleine Defekte, / die rasch eskalieren. // Ein Ruck in der Steuerung, / und es nimmt Rache. / Ein elektrischer Stoß, / und es läuft Amok. // Ein paar Milliarden Zellen / im Dunkeln. Das Menschengeschlecht, / ein winziges Knäuel / zwischen Anfang und Amnesie.”
3 See “A Theory Abandoned But Still Compelling,” Yale Medicine Magazine, Autumn 2008; or Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
4 Stuart Shanker, Reframed: Self-Reg for a Just Society (U of Toronto Press, 2020). All quotations here from pp. 9-10.
5 Another power / vulnerability of the paleo-mammalian brain not mentioned in Enzensberger’s poem except under the word Sucht [hunger, or desire]: the very closely related tendencies that we call in English perseverance (a virtue) and perseveration (a “deficit”). Shanker writes: “Perseveration is the result of what the great affective neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp described as the SEEKING system, which extends from the ventral mid-brain to the nucleus accumbens and medial frontal cortex. The SEEKING system drives animals to ‘search for the things they need, crave, and desire.’ In other words, SEEKING is the limbic secret to survival” (Reframed, 36).
6 Ira J. Chasnoff, The Mystery of Risk: Drugs, Alcohol, Pregnancy, and the Vulnerable Child (NTI Upstream, 2011), 74.
WALKING THE ROAD 